Harold Blauer was a professional tennis player. In 1935 he reached the round of 16 at the US Professional Tennis Tournament and lost to Bill Tilden. In late 1952, after a divorce, he checked into the New York State Psychiatric Institute seeking help for depression. He died there on 8 January 1953, nine days after being injected with 450 milligrams of a mescaline analogue.
The drug was MDA, code-named EA-1298. The injection was part of Project Artichoke, a CIA mind-control and chemical interrogation research program run through the Office of Scientific Intelligence. The Army Chemical Corps had a classified agreement with the psychiatric institute allowing it to study possible chemical warfare compounds by administering them to patients, and the newly created CIA had a relationship with the Army corps. That is the chain of custody of the experiment: a military program, an intelligence agency, and a hospital, with a patient at the end of it.
Between November 1952 and January 1953, Blauer was given low doses of MDA, then DMA, MDPEA, and DMA again. He asked to withdraw from the treatments because the injections were giving him strong hallucinations. He was injected anyway.
A dose set by guess
On 30 December 1952, at 9:53 a.m., he received 450 mg of MDA. The reaction was immediate: sweating, tremors, flailing, frothing at the mouth. He went into a coma and never came out of it.
The institute later said the overdose was accidental, because the safe doses for these mescaline analogues had been based only on a guess. That sentence is the centre of the case. Not malice — a guess, administered to a patient who had already asked to stop, under an agreement that was classified.
What happened next is the part that turns a tragedy into an indictment. In 1953, animal tests were run to establish LD50 values for the mescaline analogues, in secrecy, at the University of Michigan, supervised by Maurice Seevers and conducted on behalf of the Army Chemical Warfare Corps. The toxicology came after the human death. As the neuroscientist Matthew Baggott put it, the timing suggests the reaction was: we just killed someone, we need animal studies quickly.
On the same day, another patient at the institute was injected with MDA. She received 150 mg instead of the planned 450 because her reaction was "so violent that the injection was stopped when it was only one-third complete." That detail is the strongest evidence that the risk was observable in real time, and that the protocol's response to it was improvisation.
Twenty-two years
The extent of Blauer's knowledge of the experiment is unclear. What is clear is that after his death, the state of New York, the federal government, and the CIA covered it up for 22 years.
In 1987, Judge Constance Baker Motley of the Southern District of New York awarded Blauer's estate more than $700,000. Her opinion described him as a "guinea pig" and found that his medical records had been altered to disguise the actual cause of death.
Altered records are a second harm, distinct from the death. They are how an institution survives an inquiry: not by denying that something happened, but by making the record say something else. For 22 years, the only person with an interest in the truth — the family — had no way to establish it.
What the case is actually about
Three failures, and they're separable.
Consent. Blauer was a patient, not a volunteer. He asked to withdraw and was overruled. Whatever the consent documents said, the operative fact is that a man in a psychiatric hospital said stop and the injections continued. That is the line that matters, and no classified agreement moves it.
The order of evidence. A dose was guessed, administered, and only then tested in animals. The sequencing is the methodological failure, and it's the kind of failure that secrecy makes more likely: a program that cannot publish its protocols also cannot easily have them reviewed.
Diffused responsibility. Army, CIA, hospital. Each link had a reason to treat the experiment as someone else's, and the arrangement was classified precisely so that no outside party could assemble the chain. The result is an experiment with no accountable experimenter.
What it should be remembered for
The 1987 ruling gave the case a legal ending, 34 years after the fact and after the records had been tampered with. The ethics are simpler than the law: consent is not a formality to be documented after the fact; it is the thing that distinguishes research from assault. And records are the infrastructure of accountability — an institution that alters them has not just done something wrong, it has arranged to be unable to be caught.
Blauer was a tennis player who went to a hospital for depression. The most respectful thing to say about the rest is that it should have been impossible, and that the mechanisms which make it impossible are consent, review, and records that cannot be quietly rewritten.
Source: Harold Blauer — Wikipedia, citing the 1987 opinion of Judge Constance Baker Motley, 660 F. Supp. 1291 (S.D.N.Y.).